...
Beyond just serving to check-point and condition the state of future processing, these files can be broadly surveyed to determine and report upon the status of the entire dataset warehouse (which datasets are at a particular stage of processing), and to study things like “How often was process X engaged” or “How much time was spent in a particular processing stage”, or “What fraction of time is spent per stage”, etc.
(work in progress)
[This section under construction: random notes may appear here as long as “(work in progress)” appears above.]
NOTE: Publication:Pub_Push operation.
Moves a publishable warehouse dataset to the correspondingly-versioned publication directory.
If mapfile already generated in warehouse, the version_directory “.mapfile” is moved as well, else it is subsequently generated and set to that location.
The warehouse ensemble directory “.status” file remains in the warehouse until the 'warehouse:Eviction' occurs, at which point the .status file is moved to the publication ensemble directory.
Therefore, processes that operate primarily over the publication directory (possibly Mapfile_Gen, Pub_Commit, Pub_Verify) must be able to translate between a dataset’s warehouse and publication paths, in order to locate and update the .status file.